region which he named Virginia cost him more than £40,000. We note at
all turns of his fortune his extraordinary tenacity of purpose, which he
illustrated, as though by a motto, in the verses he addressed to a
comrade towards the end of his imprisonment in the Tower:--

"Change not! to change thy fortune 'tis too late;
Who with a manly faith resolves to die
May promise to himself a lasting State,
Though not so great, yet free from infamy."

So we may think of him in his prime, as he stood on the Hoe of Plymouth
twenty years before, a gallant figure of a man, bedizened with precious
stones, velvets, and embroidered damasks, shouting his commands to his
captains in a strong Devonshire accent. We think of him resolutely
gazing westward always, with the light of the sea in his eyes.

We come to the final scene which we are here to-day to commemorate.
Little honour to the rulers of England in 1618 redounds from it, and yet
we may feel that it completed and even redeemed from decay the character
of Raleigh. This tragedy, which was almost a murder, was needed to round
off the accomplishment of so strange and frantic a career of romantic
violence, and to stamp it with meaning. If Raleigh had been thrown from
his horse or had died of the ague in his bed, we should have been
depressed by the squalid circumstances, we should have been less
conscious than we are now of his unbroken magnanimity. His failures and
his excesses had made him unpopular throughout England, and he was both
proud and peevish in his recognition of the fact. He declared that he
was "nothing indebted" to the world, and again that, "the common people
are evil judges of honest things." But the thirteen years of his
imprisonment caused a reaction. People forgot how troublesome he had